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Life and links

Life is a thing. The parents came and went, and it was an awesome time, even though we didn’t really have many scheduled activities after the road trip. It was nice just generally having them around, I guess.

The latest house project is the deck. We fell behind on our time estimates (and also the forecast called for rain), so we’re only done with the scrubbing/cleaning part. We still need to sand and stain it at some point, but it needs to be when it’s going to be dry for a while, so we’ll see. It’s funny how much of a difference the cleaner makes.

I’ve had a lot of interesting reads recently, so here’s a dump of links to interesting things.

People that disagree with you aren’t necessarily wrong, or stupid – I think this is something that a lot of SJW (and other general) people are bad at recognizing. This is particularly true with things like abortion, LGBTQ rights, and Brexit… the other side has reasons for disagreeing, and digging your heels in is just going to make things worse. This is also why I feel strongly against things like the (successful) campaign to force Brendan Eich to resign over his prop 8 donations… he’s allowed to have opinions, however unpopular, as long as he’s treating people equally in his role as CEO. The fact that people bullied him and tried to force him to change his views to keep his job was completely unacceptable.

Thoughts on Brexit and democracy – It’s always interesting to me to read things that argue that mass democracy is problematic… and what’s been happening lately around the world sure supports that. In particular, the leaders in the UK seem to have no idea what to do now that they’ve actually passed their proposal to leave the EU. I stumbled across the wiki page for Germany’s Basic Law recently, and I found it super interesting that they couldn’t remove the Chancellor without a replacement lined up. Seems like a lot of populist movements need better ideas of what to do what happens after they succeed… in the Brexit case, it seems the people in charge were using the situation for political gain without any expectation of actually winning. And now that they have, they are clueless.

Fired for a proposal for relaxing the dress code – After my initial impression of “What is wrong with you?”, I actually can understand a lot of why this made sense to the OP. Coming from an academic environment, it isn’t normal to assume that some people are more equal than others, and work is not a democracy. Still, hopefully she (he?) learned a lot of valuable lessons from this. (Also, that entire blog is really interesting and informative to read.) Also I feel bad for the other interns, since it sounded like she was the ringleader, and managed to really screw a lot of other people in the process.